• 1 The outlets ranged from gossip websites such as Gawker, tweet feeds such as Michael Moore’s, tabloi (...)
• 2 Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym, “What Does the Selfie Say—Investigating a Global Phenomenon. In (...)
• 3 In their methodological section, the authors explain they based their analysis on “89 articles: 39 (...)

1During Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on December 10th, 2013, at the First National Bank Stadium in Soweto, Agence France Presse South Asia photo chief Roberto Schmidt took a photograph of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt making a selfie with U.S. President Barack Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. The image tweeted by the AFP newswire went viral and spurred an intense debate internationally in the media¹ on the use and misuse of selfies, soon nicknamed Selfiegate. Breaking away from “discourses of pathology”2 favored by many news articles on the general phenomenon of selfies, academic approaches have emerged, studying selfies through the lenses of information and communications studies, cultural studies, digital humanities, sociology of social practices, and aesthetics. Co-directing a special section of the International Journal of Communication (2015) under the banner “Studying Selfies,” Nancy K. Baym, focused with Kate M. Miltner on the American, British and Danish news coverage of the “Selfiegate” in “The Selfie of the Year of the Selfie: Reflections on a Media Scandal.” Their analysis of the news media discourse³ shaping the scandal and moral-cum-technological panic sparked by the event uncovered lingering race and gender biases as well as multiple cultural shifts and anxieties about technology, leadership, changing social mores and norms, or the evolution of journalism in the age of social media.

• 4 Schmidt himself explained, on the AFP blog page in which he was asked, after the Selfiegate, to wri (...)

3Roberto Schmidt’s photograph was dubbed “The Obama Selfie” in most news articles. First, we should keep in mind, as Milner and Baym also have, that this so-much-debated picture is not a selfie— the characteristics of which will be mentioned later in the paper —, but a photograph of the act of taking a selfie, shot by a professional photographer, AFP South Asia photo chief Roberto Schmidt, who was doing his job covering Nelson Mandela’s memorial.⁴ More than 500 photographs taken by many photojournalists attending the event were published on that day, but only one of Roberto Schmidt’s photographs would be given so much attention and remembered as “The Obama Selfie.” Here it is, in its full size, as published on Schmidt’s AFP blog page:

• 5 See the AFP blog page at https://making-of.afp.com/le-selfie.

4The other two pictures Schmidt adds along give an idea of the many various, step-by-step shots he took in the process5, somewhat deflating the notion the picture might have captured a “decisive moment.” Schmidt’s AFP blog also includes the front pages of some of the newspapers (Mail Online, The Times, Sun+, The Financial Times, The Telegraph) that commented on the event and pictures: most of them cut off parts of Schmidt’s photographs. Why not? After all, they were not interested in their iconology or aesthetics. Only the fascination about what the pictures might say of our times mattered.

• 6 Martine Joly, Introduction à l’analyse de l’image (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005).
• 7 Martine Joly, L’image et les signes : Approche sémiologique de l’image fixe (Paris: Armand Colin, 2 (...)

5Yet, when considered in its full size, the so-called “Obama selfie” carefully built from an iconographic and iconological perspective, accounting for some of its power on the viewer and its selection among all the others as the one delivering “the definitive summation” of the event. This photograph carries not only a referential function as press photographs generally do, but also an expressive one which, as Martine Joly reminds us, is also a specific function of press photographs.6 She also argues that the press photograph actually fosters contemplation through its rhetoric and aesthetic form,7 whether these criteria are deliberate or not on the part of the photographer.

• 8 Handbooks detailing basic techniques for the composition of powerful visual images abound. For exam (...)

6In Schmidt’s photograph, specific compositional elements do feed contemplation and visual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the common rule of thirds, making for a balanced composition⁸, is used, placing the Danish prime minister’s smartphone and the trio’s heads at strategic focal points:

• 9 Jerry Saltz, “Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie,” Vulture 26 (January 2014), accessed Fe (...)

9There are nevertheless a number of unpredictable, chance elements that heighten the strength of the composition, and could indeed make it worthy of another nickname given to it by art critic journalist Jerry Saltz in his Vulture article on the history of the selfie: “This was a kind of Las Meninas selfie—akin to Velázquez’s astonishing royal-portrait-plus-self-portrait, which ricochets among the subjects, switching up who’s seeing whom from where.”9 Unfortunately, Saltz’s inclusion of Schmidt’s photograph in his article is yet another cropped version of it. But his hunch about the whole photograph’s iconological value in terms of classical portraiture, hidden images and ricocheting gazes is worth exploring.

• 10 Miltner & Baym, “The Selfie of the Year of the Selfie: Reflections on a Media Scandal”, 1706.
• 11 “For taking and posing for this photograph, Thorning-Schmidt, Obama and Cameron were accused of con (...)
• 12 Miltner & Baym, “The Selfie of the Year of the Selfie: Reflections on a Media Scandal”, 1707-08. Th (...)

10As mentioned earlier, hundreds of photographs of these world leaders were taken during the memorial, but a single one captured media attention. As Baym and Miltner showed, the gazes directed at the picture and the discourse that articulated them revealed a number of social norms and cultural anxieties, among which the differing traditions of memorialization, the norms of managing emotional expression and the generally negative connotation surrounding selfie-taking, seen as an anti-social act, or a “juvenile, frivolous and narcissistic”¹⁰ gesture, not expected on the part of world leaders attending an official ceremony.11 Baym and Miltner also listed many instances of racist and sexist narratives, making for “the infantilizing of Obama, the portrayal of Michelle Obama as an angry Black woman, and illicit sexual attraction between a Black man (Obama) and a White woman (Thorning- Schmidt).”12

• 13 The paper will later discuss how selfie-taking has nevertheless also become a strategy by politicia (...)

11But on the AFP blog, Roberto Schmidt, briefly broaching the theme of the official portraiture of political leaders, underlined that the atmosphere during the four-hour long celebration was relaxed and joyful, more akin to an African-style festival than a morbid, melancholy ceremony. In this context, he felt the world leaders, snapping away pictures as they were, were simply acting like regular human beings.¹³

• 14 Josh Voorhees, “Photographer Tells the Story Behind the Obama Selfie, Laments We All Made a Big Dea (...)

12He also undermined the general “Selfiegate” narrative, which claimed Michelle Obama was upset that her husband was “misbehaving”.“In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, [British Prime Minister David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt] included,” the photographer writes. “Her stern look was captured by chance.”14

• 15 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16^th centur (...)
• 16 James Hall, “Pourquoi fait-on des autoportraits ?”. In Autoportraits: De Rembrandt aux selfies. (Ed (...)
• 17 Andreas Beyer, Portraits: A History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).
• 18 In his preface to the French translation of Lorne Campbell’s book on Renaissance Portraits, French (...)
• 19 See for instance “Michelle, who was dignity personified in black lace” in Allison Pearson, “Mandela (...)

13Michelle Obama’s pose is interesting to notice not so much from a psychological or moral perspective but rather from a visual and iconographic one, with a focus on its underlying iconographic lexicon. Her pose is strikingly reminiscent of the dominant codes of 14^th and 15^th century Italian Renaissance female portraiture, and conforms to a number of its recognizable constituent elements15 such as a deadpan profile, a straight upper body, clasped hands resting on knees, a monochrome background with or without colored draperies and eyes fixedly gazing towards an out-of-frame focal point. At that time, profile portraiture was mostly used for donor portraits, and the pose stemmed from a renewed interest in engraved medals and coins16 from the Antiquity. What’s more, it was a preferred pose for women as it was associated to virtue17, adding moral strata to the visual code. Through her isolated profile, traditionally connoting virtue, Michelle Obama appears to bear an appropriate demeanour with her gaze directed towards an out-of-frame space which we know is the celebration of deceased Mandela. And taken on its own, her pose, evocative as it is of traditional portraits, reactivates their link to death and transcendence,¹⁸ fueling the notion her pose is dignified.¹⁹

• 20 See for instance da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (1423), Uffizi Gallery, Florence and Botticell (...)

14Michelle Obama’s figure contrasts first with a group of two men, seated below, in the bottom foreground. Their faces are inwardly turned as they chat away together, the way mere bystanders commonly do on the margin of a bigger event. Their pose evokes a universally human attitude, one also often captured in many classical paintings depicting crowd attendees at important events, such as the Adoration of the Magi for instance in works by Gentile da Fabriano or Sandro Botticelli.20

• 21 Paul Frosh defines the selfie as a gestural image and explains the outstretched arms participate to (...)

17The trio offers many striking elements: even though their bodies form a triangle pointing towards the out-of-frame space, they are in fact concentrating on a much closer focal point, i.e. the smartphone which, in the process of taking their picture, creates a mirroring, inward focal point.²¹ There is an immediate sense of a shrinking, enclosed space whereas Michelle Obama’s gaze had been stretching it outwards.

• 22 See Manolo Farci & Mario Orefice. “Hybrid Content Analysis of the Most Popular Politicians' Selfies (...)
• 23 See Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearab (...)
• 24 Saltz, “Art at Arm’s Length.”

18The trio’s body pose bears all the structural characteristics and visual clichés22 of selfie-taking: the stretched arms holding the smartphone and the heads leaning closer, trying to fit within the frame23. As art critic journalist Jerry Saltz has argued in his Vulture article, selfies have become a new visual genre—a type of self-portraiture formally distinct from all others in history. Selfies have their own structural autonomy. This is a very big deal for art.” He further adds that it is “a genre that is not dominated by artists,” and that “[i]t’s possible that the selfie is the most prevalent popular genre ever.”24

• 26 Joly, L’image et les signes, 121.
• 27 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, (...)

22Moreover, his is the only face within this photograph whose far-removed, hardly discernible gaze is paradoxically directed towards Roberto Schmidt’s lens and towards us now viewing the photograph. It is directed towards an out-of-frame space that is very different from the out-of-frame space of the ceremony. The characteristic of a front-faced portrait is that it allows a relation with the viewer, through the illusionary exchange of gazes. This is underlined by Martine Joly, when she argues that this pseudo face-to-face confrontation abolishes the space for a representation and creates the semblance of an interpersonal or dual relation, with an “I” that seems to be addressing a “you” in the there and then of a visual exchange. 26Barthes also ascribes the specific power of photography to this exchange of gazes: “For the Photograph has this power – which it is increasingly losing, the frontal pose being most often considered archaic nowadays – of looking me straight in the eye.”27

• 28 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14.

23But as Mandela’ gaze is twice-removed because it is a photographed photograph, and with his face so obviously two-dimensional, so explicitly a mere, tiny image locked into its own space of representation, the illusion of a possible bridge or relation between the viewed and the viewer is easily broken. Mandela is only an image and as such he is Death personified, a phenomenon described by Barthes upon discovering a photograph of himself: “when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person; others – the Other – do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal.”28

• 29 Sontag, On Photography, 81.
• 30 “Obama, Cameron, and Thorning-Schmidt let their game faces slip by smiling and laughing when they w (...)

24Let us briefly go back to the different types of contrasting poses in Schmidt’s photograph, as things appear to be in fact slightly more complex and layered than stated so far. The four main characters are interestingly both natural and conventional, taken off-guard and set into a pose. Indeed, Michelle Obama was, in fact, not taking the pose in any way when she was accidentally captured in the classic pose of Renaissance portraiture: she was (for a fraction of a second) “spontaneously” or “naturally” conventional. As Sontag said of photography: “Life is not about significant details, illuminated aflash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”29 The photographic process froze an unselfconscious Michelle Obama into a significant, culturally charged, symbolic and conventional pose. Maybe unconsciously taking this cue, commentators in the media launched into telling the story of a dignified Michelle Obama, sitting next to misbehaving politicians. ³⁰

• 31 See Barthes: “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in t (...)
• 32 AFP blog page at https://making-of.afp.com/le-selfie.
• 33 Beccy Collings, “#selfiecontrol: @CAZWELLnyc and the role of the ironic selfie in transmedia celebr (...)
• 34 Farci & Orefice, “Hybrid Content Analysis of the Most Popular Politicians’ Selfies on Twitter.”, 3- (...)
• 35 Many papers focus on the impact of social media in politics and communication strategies. See for i (...)

25As for the trio, on the one hand, they were taking the pose for their own selfie and adjusting their smiles in their mirroring screen so as to find a conventionally natural smile.31 But if they were deliberately posing for the sake of the smartphone, they were not taking the pose for Roberto Schmidt’s camera that caught them off-guard: for once, as Schmidt argued on the AFP blog, no one was taking the pose, no one was complying to rules created by communication managers, in a ceremony lasting for several hours. According to him, the outcry his photograph triggered was in direct proportion to the control imposed on the image of head of states by communication professionals.32 And yet, though it seems a spontaneous gesture in the eyes of Schmidt, the trio is in fact taking the most newly and highly codified photographic poses of our times —a pose whose status within the visual regime and story-telling traditionnally associated to politicians’ images hovers between contrasting interpretative poles. This interpretative tension around selfies made by politicians (and celebrities) stems from their “boundary-blurring”³³ nature, allowing a combination of authenticity and contrivance, the ordinary and the exclusive, the public and the private. Despite the negative connotations associated to selfies, they “provide a way to reinforce, enlarge or break the frame of political activity as well as strengthen the traditional mechanism of political celebration (Marsch et al. 2010).”³⁴ Schmidt’s photograph is not a selfie but it forcefully frames this new pose alongside older, familiar regimes or modes of address, informing the viewer’s gaze on the nature of such representations in themselves, by encapsulating multiple conventions in portraiture as well as several media-producing traditions like that of the official photo-journalist or that of the media-savvy politician turned amateur photographer.³⁵

• 36 Jeremy W. Peters and Ashley Parker, “Facing a Selfie Election, Presidential Hopefuls Grin and Bear (...)
• 37 For instance, in their sample, Farci and Orefice show the scarcity of selfies taken directly by pol (...)
• 38 Ibid.

26For politicians selfies have become part and parcel of what is expected from them on the campaign trail, as The New York Times explained in a 2015 article: “Candidates can now spend an hour – or sometimes two, as Senator Rand Paul did last month in New Hampshire—exhausting a line of eager selfie seekers.”36 In that case, the selfie is mainly made by the “fan” with his/her own smartphone, for the purpose of feeding his own social media with “trophies”: arguably, it is strictly speaking a fan’s selfie (with a famous politician/ with the President) rather than a politician’s selfie (with a supporter).³⁷ Of course, as pointed out by the same piece in The New York Times, politicians can indirectly take advantage of this free advertising: “Many campaigns say they are benefiting after posing for all those pictures. When shared on Facebook and Instagram, they can exponentially increase a candidate’s visibility, spreading an authentic memento that helps extend the chatter around a rally beyond those who attended.”38

• 39 A quick look at the photo gallery of her Facebook page brings up numerous images of Helle Thorning- (...)

27In the case of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, her Facebook photo gallery39 clearly shows that she can be the one actually taking the picture with her own smartphone, a token of how commonly and widely accepted this practice for a leading politician is in Denmark. It may in turn explain why she would naturally take one of herself with Obama and Cameron at the ceremony, though the media storm around Roberto Schmidt’s photograph maybe have led her never to upload it on any social media platform.

• 40 Alex Greig, “White House set to BAN selfies with the President following Samsung stunt with David O (...)

28By contrast, Obama himself has hardly ever uploaded selfies he made with his own phone of himself with other people. Like others, he of course complies with selfie-taking by fans and crowds, and there are numerous examples of people uploading “selfies with the president” they took with their own phones. But in April 2014, the White House nevertheless briefly considered banning selfies with President Obama altogether when it emerged that the selfie taken by Red Sox player David Ortiz (later revealed to be contracted to Samsung) during a ceremony for the team on the South Lawn was part of a marketing strategy of the company to promote the phone by retweeting the photo with a plug for its Galaxy Note 3.40

• 41 These photographs can be found on Obama’s official White House flickr feed. Out of more than 6,600 (...)
• 42 These Twitter pictures can be found here: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/738155058177576960 (...)
• 43 Accessed February 06, 2020, https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/581535059003318272/photo/1. They (...)

29Interestingly, Obama has used the promise of a selfie with him as a way to support Organizing for Action. His communication team used official pictures taken by White House official photographer41 (most often Pete Souza) for the Flickr feed, showing visitors or supporters of Obama taking a selfie with him. They added colour filters on them along with superimposed messages for twitter posts42 such as “Get your camera ready – this is your chance to meet President Obama” or “Bucket list: Take a selfie with the President (check). Have your moment with the President.”43

• 44 Accessed 06 February, 2020, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2h2vrg.
• 45 Tom McCarthy, “Obama breaks out the selfie stick,” The Guardian 12 February 2015. https://www.thegu (...)

31To encourage young people to sign up for Obamacare before the February 15^th deadline, he featured in a Buzzfeed video entitled “Things Everybody Does But Does Not Talk About,” a spinoff of a previous popular Buzzfeed called “7 Creepy Things Everybody Does.”44 Obama is shown, while supposedly waiting for an interviewer, practicing his pitch in a mirror, especially the tricky pronunciation of the date of the deadline, which he repeats many times. “Boredom gives way to goofy behavior. He sticks his tongue out to check it. He poses in Joe Biden’s shades. He gets out the selfie stick. And he shoots those invisible hoops.”45 He also “pretends to fail to dunk a cookie in a tall glass of milk. The cookie is too big. ‘Thanks, Obama,’ the president says, joining his fans online who use the phrase to mock his opponents who use the phrase to mock the president.” Within an hour of its posting, the video had 1.6 million viewers. But again, strictly speaking, no actual Obama selfie was shown or used.

• 46 In their analysis of the 15 selfies of Obama they found, Farci and Orefice come to the conclusion t (...)

32In all these examples, the communication strategy of the White House nevertheless taps into this new popular regime of visibility, with the purpose of federating participation in a common effort.⁴⁶ The in-built virality of selfies based on their sharing on social media can only give extra leverage to Obama’s communication strategy.

• 47 Flora Drury, “‘Glad this was the only Bear I met in the park’: Obama jokes with Bear Grylls on an A (...)
• 48 It was posted on 17 April 2014, with the comment “Welcome to Instagram, Mr Vice-President,” accesse (...)

33In September 2015, as a means to promote his environmental policies, Obama wielded a selfie stick in front of the receding Kenai glacier in Alaska with celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls. Newspapers showed pictures of Obama toting the stick, while the White House Instagram account finally posted an actual Obama selfie, bearing the amateur mistake of the camera-trigger finger obscuring part of it, which was ridiculed online as a “dad move.”47 The Mail Online article includes Obama’s selfie from the White House Instagram account and an arguably better-made selfie made by Bear Grylls for his own Twitter account. Other than the above example, the only selfie that appeared (on Obama’s Facebook page in that case) is the one taken for the launching of Joe Biden’s Instagram account.48

• 49 Nathalie Heinich, De la visibilité. Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique (Paris: NRF Gall (...)

34Overall, if Barack Obama certainly made large use of social media in his communication strategy, bringing the White House into the 21^st century, his use of selfies per se, remains relatively limited. Nathalie Heinich has argued that the mobile phone reconfigured access to visibility, making for nearly absolutely conflated status between producer, broadcaster and consumer of visibility.49 Yet, except for a few exceptions, President Obama never is the producer of a photograph of himself. He is always held in someone else’s gaze, mobile phone lens and online media account, i.e the fan or the White House official photographer, Pete Souza. The latter pictures of Obama posing for selfies, taken by his official White House photographers—portraits of selfie making—have been used by his communication managers not only in decontextualized ways but also for much wider purposes and conversations than what basic selfie-taking generally entails, such as for instance his support for Organizing for Action. The fact that Obama favours photographs in which he is held by someone else’s gaze at a time when the general conflation of status is allowed by technology leads us back to the issue broached earlier of the gaze in portraits and self-portraits, an issue that requires further analysis in selfies.

• 52 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 259.
• 53 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 515-17.
• 54 Carolin Duttlinger, “Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring (...)
• 55 Duttlinger, “Walter Benjamin,” 91.
• 56 Duttlinger, “Walter Benjamin,” 88.
• 57 Duttlinger, “Walter Benjamin,” 90.

38Interestingly enough, as Duttlinger underlines, Walter Benjamin’s approach of photography in his various writings focuses on a number of portraits and what he says about them alternatively supports and contradicts his theoretical narrative about the disappearance or decline of the aura. Their frail auratic dimension is generally located in the sitter’s face, and more specifically in his/her gaze. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” he mentions early portrait photography, underlining that “in the fleeting expression of the human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time.”52 In Little History of Photography, he mentions again those early daguerreotypes: “There was an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium. And once again the technical equivalent is obvious: it consists in the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow,” due—quoting Orlik—to a “comprehensive illumination brought about by the long exposure times.”53 Benjamin then examines a childhood photograph of Kafka, when “the reproducible collodium negative replaced the costly daguerreotype, paving the way for the large-scale commercial expansion of portrait photography,”54 which then became more widely affordable. Enhancing reproducibility and the commercializing of studio portraits, these technical developments made for formulaic poses and conventional decor, and provided Benjamin with examples of “the de-individualizing effect of mechanical reproduction, namely the […] triumph of normative representation.”55 Yet, as Duttlinger shows, “although the Kafka portrait appears to support Benjamin’s historical narrative about the loss of a photographic aura, this argument is immediately undermined when Benjamin describes Kafka’s image as a pendant to its earlier, auratic predecessors,”56 and he does so by focusing on Kafka’s “immeasurable sad eyes.” As Duttlinger argues, “Kafka’s eyes […] resist the picture’s restrictive conventions. Their melancholy gaze invests the image with an element of individuality and immediacy which punctures its formulaic arrangement.”57

• 58 Duttlinger, “Walter Benjamin,” 95.

39For Benjamin, therefore, “the experience of the aura is centered on the gaze, that element which establishes a connection between viewer and sitter.”58 This motif can still be found in his text “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” even though the daguerreotype now seems divested of the inherent capacity to preserve an aura that he had granted it with in “Little History of Photography”:

• 60 Miriam Hansen. “Benjamin’s Aura”. Critical Inquiry 34, No. 2 (Winter 2008), 339.
• 61 “Selfies are media commodities in two ways. Firstly, all users of Facebook and Instagram (and simil (...)
• 62 Katie Warfield notes that this is “the first time we can use a device to simultaneously see our ref (...)

40If Walter Benjamin’s approach should be set within its historical background at a time when he tried to “reimagine (something like) experience under the conditions of technologically mediated culture”⁶⁰ and explored the effects of the commodification of images in an alienating modernity with the rise of industrial capitalism and standardization, it can nevertheless prove fruitful to link his analysis on the gaze to our own context, in which the selfie can be seen as a media commodity form, associated to a practice and shaped by political-economic power.⁶¹ With selfies, or more specifically with front-facing cameras, something in the gaze has been altered. Indeed, quoting Warfield, Jill Walker Rettberg in her book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology underlines one essential characteristic of selfie photography: the front-facing camera makes it possible to simultaneously see our reflection as in a mirror and record it, deleating and repeating the images until perfect control in self-representation is reached.62

• 63 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 510.

41Crucially, in the case of front-faced selfies, the hidden presence of a “mirror” somewhat changes the nature of the fictional exchange of the gaze between the photographed and the viewer. Even if mirrors were used by painters when they produced their self-portraits, the making of the image took so long that the captured gaze never was set as it is in instantaneous photographs. In photographic portraits, as Rettberg said, there is much less control when holding an analogue camera up to a mirror, compared to a front-faced selfie. With selfies, the power of the illusion of an exchange of gazes through space and time is much weaker for viewers than in previous forms of portraits and self-portrait. When looking at a selfie, which is easily identified through its set, formal characteristics, the viewer must know that the gaze addressed to him/her is in fact closed up upon itself, locked on to a mirror vision of itself. As a viewer, I no longer think that the photographed face can see me, but that it is looking at itself on a mirroring-like surface. The horizon of the photographed person’s gaze is no longer “absorbed in an ominous distance,”63 and the photographed person’s gaze no longer “meets” the viewer’s eye in the same way. The bridging of the inner space of the representation and the out-of-frame space of perception is not only stripped of all its magic dimension and exposed as fake but has been replaced by a mirror-like, flat surface of fake depth. To go back to Benjamin’s quote: “To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.” In fact, a selfie’s ability to look back at us is weakened in direct proportion to our knowledge that the photographed gaze it encapsulates is directed towards its own reflection, set at a mere arm’s length. This shrinking of space and focus is powerfully rendered in Roberto Schmidt’s photograph as argued earlier.

• 64 Paul Frosh also makes this point arguing the outstretched arm is an invitation to the distant viewe (...)

42Still quoting Katie Warfield, Rettberg nevertheless claims that the viewer is more closely integrated in a selfie⁶⁴:

• 66 Ana Peraica describes mobile phone culture creating an imprisonment within the media loop, “denying (...)

43However, I would rather argue that the viewer is not placed “between the face of the person photographed and the camera”; the stretched arm is not embracing the viewer but clutching the screen/mirror as a looping extension of him/herself. So if the viewer is not excluded,⁶⁶ s/he is at best put in the position of the screen, if not behind it, which once again changes the nature of the fictional exchange of gazes. Arguably, for the taker of the selfie, the inhuman confrontation with the camera that was underlined by Benjamin is also transformed: the sitter who is also the photographer now exchanges a gaze… with him/herself, or his/her own mirror image, and only so when s/he takes the picture. Indeed, in taking the selfie, as Bertrand Naivin argues, the taker-cum-sitter’s gaze appears to be skewed on the resulting image, this obliqueness being a trace of what I introduced above as the interruption in the exchange of gazes, between sitter and viewer: